Considering that the creative team leading the production of Bientôt l'Été comprises an American-Belgian pairing of Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, the game is perhaps surprisingly the most nouvelle vague game in tone I have ever played.

Exhibit a: Bientôt l'Été is inspired by the novella Moderato Cantabile, by Marguerite Duras, in which a bourgeois French wife's affectless existence is disrupted by a shooting at the café by the beach where she sits while her son takes piano lessons. She and Chauvin, a former employee of her husband, meet repeatedly at the café and speculate about the lives and motivations of the lovers involved in this crime of passion, until eventually their platonic affair intrudes into her married life.

Exhibit b: Moderato Cantabile was filmed by giant of the British stage Peter Brook. However, it starred Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jeanne Moreau, thus making it not only a French film but possibly the most French film imaginable.

Exhibit c: The core gameplay of Bientôt l'Été involves walking along a beach finding emotionally resonant objects in a single-player environment, before sitting in a cafe smoking, drinking red wine and exchanging serendipitously apt lines of conversation culled from the works of Marguerite Duras. This is the co-op/competitive multiplayer section. There is no horde mode currently available.

Exhibit d: Oh, yes. While in the building, it is possible to listen to a series of chansons on the jukebox. Just in case you were unconvinced.

Bientôt l'Été changes the game somewhat by setting the gameplay inside a virtual reality simulation occupied by lonely space station workers looking for human contact, but even that is very European, in a sort of Metal Hurlant, Roger Vadim-y way. Confronted by the technology to communicate instantaneously over vast distances, our hypothetical holodeck scientists have created an environment in which to have affairs with other cosmonauts which only serve to emphasise their isolation.

(Yes, I know jokes about Jean-Paul Belmondo and Roger Vadim are not exactly at the cutting edge, but leaving it at "this is just like one of those weird French films" has already been done. If I could write like a proper games journalist, I would, but let's just try to make the best of things.)

Tale of Tales

When it was released in 1958, Moderato Cantabile divided critical opinion. Many critics praised its style and tone, and its submerged critique of the French class system, while others complained that, while nothing happened very prettily, nothing happened. One can imagine the arguments - one side telling the other that they just don't get it, the other responding that there is nothing to get, and their opponents were just pretending to see the Emperor's clothes, in the hope of seeming cultured.

If anything, it actually plays less like an FPS than this trailer would suggest.

Conveniently, we do not need to go back to 1958 for this argument, since it has accompanied every game Tale of Tales has released, at least since their breakthrough works The Graveyard and in particular The Path. Reviled and adored in approximately equal measure, The Path was either a pointless and sexually predatory perversion of the action-adventure genre or a must-play expanding of the emotional and narrative possibilities of gaming. Probably a 7, overall.

If you haven't played The Path, and you are interested in games, it is worth doing. You will probably at least dislike it in an interesting way, and there is a demo on Steam.

Which brings us back to Steam. When it initially launched, Bientôt l'Été was not eligible for automatic inclusion on the dominant PC gaming download platform - a platform so broad that even niche titles pick up considerable sales numbers from being in the tail of the comet. Despite their previous games' presence on Steam, the crude democracy of Greenlight meant that without permission by fiat by Valve, Bientôt l'Été would have to go through its crowdsourced approvals process.

(Stating the blindingly obvious, Valve's Gabe Newell said recently that Greenlight would not be in place forever, as electing what goes onto the marketplace by majority vote has some severe limitations in terms of getting the best games onto Steam.)

However, Bientôt l'Été having now been nominated for an Independent Games Festival Award, it has, thorough Steam's promise to put straight onto its virtual shelves all the IGF games whose creators were willing and able to propose them. So, Bientôt l'été has joined The Path, The Graveyard and Salomé in the Steam store.

Like Ed Key's excellent Proteus, released on Steam last week, Bientôt l'Été is straight-up it's-not-a-game ragebait. My favorite response to this is, indubitably, Dan (Dear Esther) Pinchbeck's: when asked if Dear Esther was a game, he responded "well, it's a game engine". Bientôt l'Été is an interactive system offering experiences based around computerized environment drawing and physics engines.

(Ironically, it is possible to play chess within the game itself, although in gaming terms this is only accessible to level 80 players in the endgame. Chess, for reference, is definitely a game). When it was first released, through Tale of Tales' website, I asked Samyn about this inevitability. He had been talking in his developer's notes about this perhaps being the last characteristically "Tale of Tales" game he and Harvey would make, citing the reception they got. His response was eschatological in nature:

We do not see ourselves so much as game developers [...] We are simply artists. We use the medium of videogames for our art. Because we feel that it offers us a toolset to speak about contemporary issues to a contemporary audience. More than any other medium, or art form.

The big disadvantage of this choice, however, is that it limits our audience to gamers. And we are always surprised by how separate this group is from the rest of the world. Maybe this is not so apparent in the US or the UK, but in continental Europe, and definitely in Belgium, most people don't play videogames. And if they do, it's just puzzle games. The kind that they used to play on a table top and now on digital screens. But that is not what we talk about when we refer to videogames as a medium.

So our audience is a niche within that niche of people who play videogames. And while we deeply appreciate the attention we get and swoon at the thought of how important our games are to some players, we do feel a bit trapped. We have always believed that videogames could be a medium that appeals to everyone. But games like Bientôt l'Eté can only be experiments that inspire in that direction. We want to do more.

Because, and forgive the melodrama of this, we feel that the world is in a dire state. We are now literally looking at the extinction of the human race. Not by pressing some button and firing a bunch of missiles but simply by doing nothing. If we do nothing, the world will end. The systems that we have set in motion will continue to run by themselves until they crush us.

The really problematic part of all this is that nobody with the power to stop this nonsense seems to be willing to. There does not seem to be any desire to save our planet. And I think this has everything to do with the state that our civilisations have been put in by neoliberal dogmatism, which in turn is the result of all those good things like humanism, democracy, freedom, etc. But somehow, somewhere, something has gone wrong. And we don't seem to be willing to fix it. Willing, I say. Because capable we certainly are. We just have to stop being so damn selfish.

This is where art comes in: art, even through something apparently simple as the appreciation of beauty, has the power to give people a sense of self worth, a dignity, an understanding of how their lives are worthwhile. Worth saving. Art in and of itself is a good reason to save this planet. The fact that this species has been capable of creating pyramids, cathedrals, frescoes and poems that are nothing less than divine makes it worth saving.